(YBYR9) How To Get To $10k Months – Part 1

Welcome to episode 9 How To Hit $10k months part 1. YAY! We are getting to some more advanced stuff. So don’t get me wrong, I actually love the beginner stuff because it’s so powerful.

Often people come looking for a fancy funnel or a new shiny marketing platform or tactic but nearly always it’s something in the basics that needs fixing to make the difference.

However this episode is all about once you have your business set up – how to then hit the $10k months. Let’s get started…

In episode #3 The Online Business Success Ladder I talked about the 5 stages of business. If you want to hear more about how the stages work definitely have a listen to that episode as I go in to more detail. Here’s a quick overview so you have some context of where you might be at now in comparison to those $10k months:

Dreamer – where you’re still thinking about it and haven’t really committed yet.

Starter – where you get your foundation set up. This is the point where you start earning.

Hustler – where you are working the plan and growing what you’ve created. You are earning $3-$10k a month.

Pro – where you’ve reached a level of stability and can be earning from whatever makes you happy a month to $30k a month.

And if whatever makes you happy a month is above $30k a month then you are looking to hit CEO Level where you are leveraging your income streams and earning even more.

So how do you hit $10k months?

If you are at the Starter Stage you may have some sporadic sales already. To get to $10k months you need to get through the Hustler Stage and get into Pro.

A few things can happen when you come out of Starter Stage…

Because you’ve come out of building and you likely haven’t found your feet yet it can be easy to flounder and start messing with what you’ve created.

You can start tinkering with EVERYTHING and end up breaking what was working.

You can also get despondent if you hear too many nos in a row and lose momentum.

The thing to remember here is in many ways you are looking to consistently break your own records to hit your goal.

What does an athlete do when he or she has had some early successes?

They work to do better. They try and break their own records.

This is the attitude that you need to come to with this business situation. It’s about momentum, not about giving up, getting complacent or switching too many things up.

So what is the core thing that is going to move you from $0-$3k months to $10k months?

There’s a number of things propping this up but the main one is SALES.

SALES – the very thing that matters. And it’s how you work on your sales and how you think about them that makes a difference.

I think about this as an Increasing Your Sales Cycle. If you are familiar with Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (and it doesn’t matter if you’re not) it’s similar in that we cycle round as our learning (or in this case our results) improve.

We go through 4 stages:

Doing the work

Reflecting on the work and the results of it

Improving our skills

Integrating those new skills

The Increasing Your Sales Cycle

Then the cycle continues and your results continually improve.

You do the work – which is do your lead generation (your marketing), have your sales conversations (or work your sales process). You reflect on what worked and what didn’t, deepen your sales and marketing skills with new learnings, integrate them into what you are doing , do the work and then reflect and we go round and round again.

And as you go round you get better, you have more conversations, more turn more of them into clients and your income improves.

It’s this relatively simple process, at least from the overview, that will get you to $10k months.

Not shiny marketing tactics, not magic tricks. Literally working what you’ve created so you have more conversations, convert more to sales, get more testimonials and referrals, increase your prices etc etc

You consistently work at breaking your own records

In some ways this reminds me of when I was living in Brazil and determined to learn to speak Portuguese which was my first attempt at becoming fluent at a foreign language.

This sounds irrelevant I know but it’s actually the same process of getting results.

Before I left England to go to Brazil I borrowed a phrase book from the library that had a bunch of phrases in it. Before you ask – yes this was pre Internet. I read the book over and over because it was my life line to being able to communicate with the locals as I was going to a village in the middle of nowhere.

So when I touched down in Brazil I wasn’t completely useless and I even managed to understand the announcements when I was on the internal flight to where I was going to be living to NOT GET OUT of the plane when it landed because it was actually running like a bus route and there were multiple stops. Near disaster averted there! I mean seriously? How would you know?

But getting back to our comparison – when I was there I had to work the plan which was speak Portuguese every day all day even if I did have contact with someone who spoke English.

I took my Portuguese dictionary everywhere with me and every time I got stuck and had to look up a word I marked the page. When I got home I checked all the marked pages. Worked out why I was stuck (the reflecting) and wrote up the new words I had to learn and revised. (I know, so diligent. but I was really committed, because I only had 6 months to hit my goal of becoming fluent then it was back to England)

And probably with your business there is a “back to England for you too” right?

That was me improving my skills.

Then I would read my word book over and over (integrating my new skills) and get up the next day and interact and talk and fumble and stuff up and feel like an idiot and look up words in my book and the cycle continued.

Do the work > reflect on results > improve your skills > integrate your skills > then round again

Whether you’re learning a language or trying to break your own records to hit $10k the basis of doing this is the same thing:

Focus on what matters.

Do the work.

Reflect on the work

Improve your skills.

Integrate your learnings.

Back to doing the work.

So when you see some hyped up marketing strategy and shiny new funnel promising the world know that honestly, what will get you to the income levels you are looking for is getting down to the part that you might be avoiding.

Working on your sales skills, and seeing how you go, and improving and learning and going over again.